Deployable AI for last-mile finance; new on-campus office accelerates research-to-scale

Dvara Holdings and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Dharwad have announced a pioneering partnership that fuses academic excellence with applied innovation to address last-mile challenges in finance, agriculture, and community health. This collaboration, anchored in a shared commitment to inclusive technology, brings together IIT Dharwad’s research depth and Dvara’s field-tested expertise to create a scalable ecosystem where research seamlessly transitions into real-world impact.

At the core of this alliance lies a bold ambition: to harness artificial intelligence responsibly for those most excluded from the formal economy—farmers, small entrepreneurs, and low-income households. The two institutions are co-developing AI-led solutions that directly tackle structural gaps in access, productivity, and resilience, ensuring that the benefits of technology reach the most vulnerable communities.

Samir Shah, Executive Vice-Chair and Co-Founder of Dvara Holdings, described the partnership as “a convergence of two distinct strengths—academic excellence and deep field experience.” He added, “Our collaboration with IIT Dharwad exemplifies how academia and industry can come together to create real-world impact through AI. The work being done here not only pushes technological boundaries but also serves communities that have traditionally been underserved. With a focus on scale, speed, and sustainability, we are building new models of innovation that can be replicated across sectors and geographies.”

Central to this vision is the newly inaugurated Dvara Centre of AI for Financial Inclusion, located on the IIT Dharwad campus. The Centre functions as a dynamic living lab—an environment where Dvara engineers, IIT faculty, and student innovators collaborate to move ideas rapidly from concept to prototype to scalable deployment. It serves as the operational hub for translating cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, computer vision, and remote sensing into deployable solutions for financial inclusion, agricultural productivity, and community health. The Centre aims to directly benefit millions across rural India, particularly smallholder farmers, micro-entrepreneurs, and low-income households seeking greater access to finance and opportunity.

Among the initiatives currently under development is Dialog, an intelligent video platform that simplifies complex financial conversations by enabling real-time transcription, translation, summarisation, and image analysis—enhancing the clarity and inclusiveness of financial interactions. Another project, Sarathi, is a multilingual, voice-based assistant designed to empower field agents with instant, context-sensitive responses about products, processes, and policies in regional languages. Complementing these is Vision, a comprehensive onboarding and verification suite that leverages facial recognition, liveness detection, and OCR-based KYC systems to ensure secure and seamless access to financial services.

Beyond finance, the partnership extends into agricultural intelligence through Dvara E-Registry, which is using AI models to forecast horticultural prices based on local and market data—helping farmers make more informed cropping and sales decisions. The team is also advancing remote-sensing diagnostics and UAV-based crop monitoring for coffee and other perennial crops, enabling timely, precision-based interventions that protect yields and enhance farmer profitability.

In the domain of health and financial resilience, Dvara Health Finance is piloting AI-powered audio health summaries that translate clinical data into simple, actionable insights for community health workers. These innovations bridge the gap between healthcare and financial well-being, reinforcing the link between preventive health, productivity, and household resilience.

Prof. Venkappayya R. Desai, Director of IIT Dharwad, underscored the broader vision of the initiative: “This partnership with Dvara Holdings reflects IIT Dharwad’s commitment to research with tangible societal impact. By exposing our students to real-world problem statements and fostering continuous knowledge exchange through Dvara’s Centre of AI for Financial Inclusion on the campus, we are creating a model of academia–industry collaboration that can drive inclusive innovation across India. Our shared goal is to ensure that AI is not only cutting-edge but also people-centric and transformative.”

With multiple Dvara companies now anchoring their R&D and prototyping efforts at the Centre, the collaboration is set to deepen across new domains—expanding the boundaries of applied AI for development. As the partnership grows, its defining ethos remains clear: to develop technology that is not only advanced but also trusted, ethical, and contextually relevant. In a landscape where artificial intelligence often risks widening divides, Dvara and IIT Dharwad are demonstrating how responsible innovation can bridge them—bringing precision, empathy, and inclusion to the very last mile.